In this week’s episode, Jenn and Kalli dive into how to market your self-written business book. Roger Hurni, founder of Off Madison Avenue & Lighthouse PE and author of Outthink Outperform, shares his journey and practical advice on getting your book noticed. He talks about the first steps to take, how to stay organized, and what it really takes to get your book in front of the right people. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to boost your book marketing, this episode has some great tips to help you make a real impact.
imPRessions Season 2 Episode #22 Transcript
Kalli: Hey, Jenn!
Jenn: Hey, Kalli!
Kalli: Jenn, do you have any business books or almost like self-help for career books that really stood out to you that you read? I mean, I know.
Jenn: They’re like a dime a dozen, but I did read, uh, Tony Shay. He was the founder of Zappos.com, and I read his book, “Delivering Happiness”, and this book came out a while ago, a long time ago, before, it was like a fad to put out books about work culture and, you know, how to run a company and things like that. And I read it when I was like, right at the start of my career. So, I know that one in particular really resonated with me, and unfortunately, Tony Shay has since passed, but he was a really brilliant business mind and leader in a company before, like workplace culture was a thing. He kind of established that at Zappos. So I don’t know… do you have any?
Kalli: I do. I actually am a big fan of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. It was a book that was recommended to me while I was in college. One of my professors was like, everyone in every industry should read this book. It really helps you. You know, with being likeable but respected and, you know, especially in our industry, we provide strategic counsel to, whether it’s a client or if you’re in-house, if it’s the company you work for, it really helps you understand how to persuade people and get people on your side. And, you know, I like the idea of, like, it’s friends with people because they help you figure out how people how to get people to trust you in a really smart and a good way. And then today we actually are going to talk about, you know, all these business books and how to get people to talk about them, how to market them with Roger Hurni. He actually just wrote a book himself. So I’m excited to see what his journey was and what insight he has for people who want to share their expertise with a book.
Jenn: That sounds great. I’m sure it will be really insightful for our listeners, as a lot of people are opting to writing books on specific subject matter that they’re experts in now. So I think this will be a really interesting topic to cover.
Kalli: Great. Well, let’s get to it. Writing a book is a monumental achievement, but without the right marketing strategy, even the most valuable insight can go unnoticed. Proper marketing not only ensures your book reaches its intended audience but also amplifies your authority, drives your industry’s sales, and opens doors to new opportunities. Today, we explore the art of marketing self-written business books with Roger Hurni, the founder of Off Madison Avenue and Lighthouse PE and author of “Outthink, Outperform: Transform Your Organization Through Behavior Marketing”. Together, we’ll explore why investing time and resources into a well-crafted marketing plan is essential for any author looking to make a meaningful impact. Hi, Roger. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Roger: Thank you very much for having me on the show. I really appreciate it.
Jenn: Hey, Roger. So you wrote a book. A lot of experts in this field and, you know, across various industries. That’s a very common next step in their career. And I love that, I love that. It gives, like, that expert insight into a subject matter that people can learn a little bit more about. What are the first steps someone needs to take when they come up with the idea that they want to write a book when they’re planning to market their self-written business book? What is the very first thing they should be doing?
Roger: Well, the very first thing they should be doing in this process is the one thing I hate, and that is put together a spreadsheet. I know this sounds really fundamental. What you don’t realize is that there are a massive amount of activities that have to be done, and keeping yourself organized into what those are, and the timing of each is really critical. And so unless there’s some other program out there that’s similar to that, but having a spreadsheet with multiple tabs for different kinds of activities is really critical.
Kalli: Oh, that makes a lot of sense because obviously you want to track everything you’re doing and really make the most out of spreading the word. So, kind of taking a little bit of a step back. What motivated you to write this book, in particular, your new book? And how does it reflect your journey and your expertise in the industry?
Roger: Well, the book is about how you change behavior, specifically consumer behavior, but it can also be a company’s behavior, employee behavior. And it’s actually something I’ve done my entire career. And I put this in the book “Outthink, Outperform” that I didn’t know how. I actually did that for a very, very long time until I got trained on some models and methodologies from doctor BJ Fogg at Stanford University, who runs the Behavior Persuasive Lab there. And so it gave me a language and a set of models to use to show people how you can actually shift consumer behavior. So two things were happening. We shifted inside the companies that I own, how we approach everything. It took what was an instinctive process by people and made it a very conscientious one. When we saw how effective that was. I got the idea that, look, I know a lot of people can’t hire an agency like mine, like off Madison Ave or build an app through my company Lighthouse PE or something like that. So I the idea that I could help people shift customer behavior and help those small to medium sized businesses, it’s easy to help the larger ones have access to that kind of information for $15-$20 bucks. It seemed like a no brainer to me. What? I had to get over what the book was going to be about, and if it really could have a niche. And when I started looking at all the books that are out there, and I know there’s a lot of books on marketing and they all cover very specific areas, but in general, there are books about leadership, there are books about how you can operate a company. There’s quite a few books about emotional intelligence that people can use, and then there’s books about aspects of marketing, but there didn’t seem to be something that could give you a formula on how to think, how to approach problems from a lateral perspective and solve them in a way that had sustainable change, and that’s in its totality, became the reason why I ended up writing “outthink outperform”.
Jenn: I love that. Yeah. And I agree with you. There’s a lot of that, I don’t know, very common traditional marketing topics out there book-wise, but you really honed in on a very specific topic and subject matter, which I think is really interesting. Now you have your own companies; I know that you pretty much, I’m assuming, when writing this book, knew your target audience, knew exactly who was going to read this book. If I decided that I wanted to write a book on something, can you tell us-how did you effectively identify and connect with your target audience? I guess through your marketing, you know, you want to make sure that your book resonates with the right readers. So, how did you go about doing that?
Roger: Well, I had a good writing coach, which is another thing that I would recommend first time authors have. They can help you organize chapters, your thoughts sequencing like a lot of those kinds of things, are incredibly helpful. The one advice I was given from several, and I know you’ve had authors on here, like Jay Baer on speaking, and he’s a good friend of mine. The one thing that I’ve been told by people like him or Kelly McDonald or other authors of books is you actually can’t really be too narrow. It’s actually more hurtful to be too broad. And so I started off as being all businesses. And then, in the context of my conversations with my coach, her name is Isabella Talbot. Fantastic person. We narrowed it down into, okay, large businesses will get a lot of out of this, but really, let’s focus maybe on small to medium-sized businesses and the lessons they can learn. And then, while we could focus on everything about that business from owners to employees, let’s make sure we leverage our expertise in marketing and make that the focal point, but then highlight the fact that you can pull this out into other things, as opposed to just trying to be way too broad. That’s how I got to the content of “Outthink Outperform”. And that would also be my advice for first-time authors who are writing non-fiction books, particularly in business. The more narrow you can be, the more you can fill a niche. It’s better for sales, it’s better for speaking opportunities, and it’s better to set up your expertise. No one needs to write another book on leadership. I seriously doubt I’ve read like half a dozen of them. I really don’t need to read another book on leadership unless it’s somebody who’s ridiculously famous, and I want to read their perspective.
Jenn: That makes sense. How long did this book take you to write? Out of curiosity.
Roger: You need to break up that answer into like two parts because I thought, like, writing the book would be like, I’m done! I literally remember I wrote the last sentence of the book, not including the dedication and the acknowledgements, which doesn’t take a ton of time, the day before I left for vacation last summer, and I literally wrote the last sentence, and I was like, I’m done. I had no idea that I was sitting at a 9 to 10 month production schedule. Setting up marketing, setting up all these things. I was told that if you write a book in about nine months, I’m assuming everyone has a job. If you don’t have a job, you can do it in six months pretty easily. But you know you’ve got other responsibilities: family, job, whatever. You got to look at like 9 to 11 months, 9 to 12 months, maybe. So that’s the actual writing part of it. You need to basically double that in terms of going through a content editor, going through first pass grammar, going through second pass grammar, then there’s fact checking, then there’s rewriting based on fact checking, there’s attributions like there’s so each one of those is its own sort of edit point. Each one of them takes a certain amount of time before you even get to designing the cover, laying it out, determining the marketing support behind it. And so it’s just it is a lot longer process than people think. But the good thing is, is that books have a really great shelf life. I mean, I know they’re around forever, but that’s not what I mean by shelf life. I mean, once you write a book, you can leverage that book and speaking opportunities for the next 4 to 5 years. So, if you think about a book coming out every couple of years, if every 2 or 3 years you’re putting out a book, you have now built your own sort of flywheel in terms of leveraging your expertise.
Kalli: That’s so true. I mean, it’s funny because the shelf life, the first thing I would think about that’s on a shelf is a book, so definitely good to have that longevity. I’m wondering, what are some of the proven strategies that experts can use to build anticipation and generate buzz before their book actually hits the shelf?
Roger: It’s a great question. There’s two primary things. I’m sure there’s a lot of things I can’t think of, or I never approached. But the two things that people have given me counsel for and even my coaches had set me up with: The first is to create an influencer list. Now, this isn’t an influencer list of like your social media influencers that you don’t know that can talk about your book. That’s not what I mean. The influencer list is people that you know who can weigh in on the expertise of that book. You’re looking for basically endorsements. And I’m again, I’m fortunate enough to know a lot of authors, and people who own businesses. And so my influencer list is not a huge list. I think I had like 20 names on it. And I had that influencer list where I reached out to them and said, “hey, can I provide you a preview of the manuscript because I would love to get your endorsement about the book that I could use to market it to put on the book.” And if you know those people, well, you honestly, you’re going to basically get 95%. I think I had literally one person on my list of 20 not get back to me with a quote. And I barely knew that person. I just knew that they were super influential. So I was like, I’m gonna just go for gold here. So that’s a very finite list. You’re going to be open communication with them, and when it comes to giving them the manuscript, there’s two things you should give them. You should give them an option. You can give them the entire manuscript, and it doesn’t have to be the final one. It can just be the first pass after the content edit knowing that things are going to change, it’s very acceptable. And then you can give them a mini version, you cut out a lot of the storytelling, and you get it down to the fact. So you, you know, an average business book is 40 to 50,000 words. I think mine’s coming in around 40 to 3000 something and change. I got it down to about 7500 words to like a mini manuscript that highlighted the most important parts of each chapter. So I provided those influencers with both of those options. You can read the full manuscript, you can read the 30-minute version, basically of 7,500 – 8,000 words, and I’d love to get your endorsement. You collect those endorsements, you thank them, you let them know they’re going to be published in the book. So that’s the first thing. Influence your list of people that you know that can really positively impact the marketing of the book and it’s acceptance. The second one is- I’m not sure if I really love this term, it’s just what my publisher called it, a book army. Now, the book army is hundreds of names. Everybody that you know in business, everybody that would potentially buy the book or potentially recommend the book after they purchase it, could potentially write reviews. And what you’re going to do for them is you’re going to set up an email sequence of about 4 to 5 emails that let them know, like this book will be coming out, i’d love for you to be able to buy it and read it. You’re going to send them another email saying, here’s the launch date. I’m giving you a discount to buy it here. I’m running an Amazon special for $0.99 for a, you know, a Kindle version after they’ve gotten 2 or 3 of those kinds of emails, it’s like, hey, if you always manage the list accordingly. But now that you’ve picked up the book, I’d love for you to leave a review and then maybe even like a follow up email like if you want to buy any books in bulk for your company, like, here’s a discount code where you can buy books in bulk, or you can get discounts on speaking fees. You can get discounts on whatever. Everyone’s going to be a little different, but having that book Army is really what helps you get the book out there. And now, I want to add one other thing. It’s sales are actually, again, everyone has different goals, sales are not actually that critical, at least for me. Mine has actually done fairly well compared to industry averages. I cared about booking speaking opportunities, bookings podcasts, setting up my expertise, as well as being able to get reviews. And I’m only in the beginning stages, but you’re going to need to get to about 25 or 30 reviews for your book to be taken seriously by anybody if you’re going to leverage it for something else. Workshops, speaking opportunities, other new business opportunities, what have you.
Jenn: Yeah, that’s great advice. I know Stefan has been approached numerous times by people writing books and asked for an endorsement. So you do have like that business front as well, and then you have the book army people who are kind of your quintessential book influencers or whatnot. My sister in law is actually one of them. She has a very she has a pretty extensive following on social media, and publishers send her books all the time, and authors send her books for an authentic review. I have no idea. She’s in grad school, she works full time as a paralegal, and she reads books like she’s very, very, very busy. But exactly right. Like you need that authentic drive of those types of people to push a book forward so that you reach the right audiences.
Roger: Yeah, again, I think it’s a really important point that there’s a book army that you control as an author that are people that, you know, industries that, you know, creating that database, there’s the influencers that, you know. But when you even have a self-published book, you’re going to work with some kind of publisher. They will be able to set up systems so that you can get them into people like the hands of your sister in law, where like, we did a promotion on Goodreads and said, “hey, we’re going to give you a free audio version in exchange for review,” and we got nearly a thousand people downloading it. And that’s considered really successful because usually they only see like 150 or 200, and I got 973 I think, or something. So, like, that’s super, super positive. But you have to do those kinds of things to get people to read the book and post reviews. I can’t emphasize enough because I’m in the middle of it and trying to solicit them and get reviews are really, really a big deal there. Honestly, it’s a bigger deal than sales.
Jenn: You talked to a little bit more about some of the marketing on your end on like kind of your own personal brand to drive this book. You look for podcast opportunities. Obviously, we’ve talked about reviews. What else are you doing or what else should someone else do to kind of take that next step in marketing themselves? Because you’re the author, right? So at the end of the day, you’re the one that’s really going to drive your own marketing and your own branding, and you want people to read this book. What are some other ways, whether it’s PR, social, or anything else that we haven’t talked about, that you would recommend to somebody who’s thinking about writing a book, make sure you do this thing.
Roger: I don’t know if there’s one thing because there’s no silver bullet. It’s a lot of things that you need to do to have proof points. So, it’s critical to have your like-if you’re going to have one thing, have a website. Have a website about the book, have a website about yourself. Make sure there’s information for people to get additional content or sign up for an email list. Having a website might be the one thing I would tell you, but you need to put together an ecosystem of proof points. So, I have a TikTok channel, and I have an Instagram channel where I put behavioral marketing tips on there that people for like less than a minute can go like, “oh, so that’s how I should handle a pricing strategy,” or “that’s how I should look at shifting my marketing strategy for buying” to helping or something like that. So those are proof points having for speaking. If you’re going to speak about your book, having a profile on Espeakers or being part of the National Speakers Association, having a consistent email system for people to sign up for emails, something I don’t have yet, or doing something like newsletters about content around your area of expertise on LinkedIn, which is arguably, I think, the actual best social channel for books. You need to put together all of those things in order to have a good book support ecosystem. If you think about it as you’re one and done with just a website, you’re going to really not be successful.
Kalli: It’s really important to have that ecosystem. You talked about working with influencers and different associations. Are there any other types of strategic partnerships or collaborations that would help the successful marketing of a business book?
Roger: The amount of associations collaborations that you need is overwhelming. I’ll be honest with you, I had no idea again, going into what it took to get the book in people’s hands and everything that you need to do to make sure that the book is protected. So, it’s a massive list of companies and organizations. So, once I actually wrote the book and had gone through all the different kinds of edits, some of this stuff happened simultaneously. I had to file to get the book into the Library of Congress. I had to file to get the book copyrighted and make sure no one could steal the material. I had to set up a form so that it could be put into public libraries, if a public library so choose to get the book anywhere in the country. I had to set up a form to allow book retailers to get the book from Barnes and Noble to the bookstore that you see going through an airport. Amazon’s not the end all Be all. There’s companies like Goodreads and stuff like that, which I actually think is probably owned by Amazon. So you have to set up Amazon accounts to be able to get the book on there. You have to set up publishing like the hardcovers, actually published in the UK, the paperback is published here in the United States. So, those are two different companies. And even if you get all that done and you have a website, then you need a company to run your email system. You need a transaction company, like I use Shopify to run transactions because you’re going to be selling stuff on your site, or you’re going to be selling stuff directly through like Ingram, which is another association or a company that you have to set up stuff for. So all of again, this is where I said the spreadsheet really helps. All of those different companies with a good coach, a good publisher that you’ve hired for self-publishing books, they will be able to walk you through that, because I found it incredibly confusing, and Kate was my person and I on that part of it. And I just would be like, okay, Kate, what’s next? She goes, fill out this form, get this account set up, and then they’re setting up a bank account to make all the transactions happen so that you can actually get paid, the pittance that you get paid on the sale. Because again, the business model isn’t about selling books because an author makes $2 to $3 a book. So, you spend 20 bucks on a book or 15 bucks on a book. The author doesn’t make very much money. So, there has to be a business model behind the book if you’re going to be a successful author.
Jenn: Wow. Last couple of questions. You’ve sort of answered my question before I got to it, which is great. That’s what podcasting is for, and I love that. I was going to say, “What are some of the challenges?” but I think we’ve really covered that. So I’m going to pivot a little bit. But it really is no easy feat to write a book, to publish a book. I mean, this isn’t something that you have to have a lot of patience, and you have to have somebody like your Kate right to really walk you through the process. I don’t think anyone can just Google, “Okay, I want to write a book, and I’m going to do it and publish it, and it’s going to be so easy.” So I think that’s important because there are a lot of people that have a lot of really great insight and expertise on things. It doesn’t mean it’s going to be able to translate into a book unless you really have that dedication to put the time in.
Roger: Yeah, that’s very true. I mean, writing the book is literally 40% of the process. I won’t even be generous and say it’s 50%. It’s 40% of the process. The majority of the process is everything else around the book. And it’s an investment. It’s an investment in time, but it’s an investment in money. All of these things cost money. So again, it’s you’re building a bit of a business or supporting a business with the book. Then you have to look at that not as a cost but as an investment into where you can drive larger amounts of revenue than $2 or $3 a book.
Jenn: It’s very true. I’d like to know now that the book’s out, its hard part is over. What have you done since? Are you planning on writing another book? Are you doing. I know you mentioned that the shelf life of a book can lead you to many years of speaking opportunities. Anything there that we can talk about that you’ve done recently or that you’re planning on doing for our listeners?
Roger: Well, supporting the book is also supporting the expertise. And they’re one and the same, so the content on LinkedIn and TikTok and Instagram around behavioral marketing or soliciting reviews or content that’s in the book that’s ongoing for not just the book, but for my expertise as a behavioral strategist and someone who’s able to shift consumer behavior. So, and now that ecosystem is starting to take because my book just came out in June. So, it’s not like it’s been very long. So now it becomes a matter of speaking opportunities, leveraging it for workshops like that’s the revenue stream really for the book. It’s funny that you say your next book because I’m still writing articles. I’m a contributing writer for Forbes as part of the agency council. I’ve been asked to write articles like IPRA in Europe just asked me to write an article about consumer behavior or business behavior in terms of how you function with AI. And I wrote this great article that talks about how AI really is not artificial intelligence. It’s not sui generis. It’s not a sentient being. It’s really artificial interpretation because it interprets all the existing data that’s already out there. And I use this great story about teaching my teenage son to drive where it’s like he got in the car. and he’s seen a lot of Grand Theft Auto, played a lot of Grand Theft Auto, seen people drive. If he were artificial intelligence, you would think he would just drive right off the bat without any teaching from me. And that’s what we expect AI to do. And any reasonable adult would be like, you’re never going to get in a car with a teenager for the first time behind the wheel, and they think they’re going to just drive down the freeway. It’s just not going to happen. When I wrote that article, my rep for pitching speaking said, “oh my God, that’s what you should be speaking about. That should be your next book.” So then I met with my coach actually last week, and so the next book actually gets started in September, and we’re going to start looking at a human-centric approach to how businesses and individuals can approach AI. And at this juncture, when we talked about that audience question from earlier, I have no idea who the audience is going to be. I suspect it’s going to be individuals inside of companies. Maybe companies approach to AI, but it could be other things that I’m not even thinking of because when you start writing, and even if you have a really great outline, things just change in the writing process. Stories come up, you know? AI in particularly is a moving target. But yeah, the next step is to continue building that ecosystem, continue writing articles, and continue building expertise. I don’t know if I’ll finish this second book, but I’m going to get started on it. I think there’s a book there. You don’t know until you’re halfway done writing.
Kalli: I kind of love that mindset and the fact that you’re like, “Let’s just see where this goes.” I feel like when people start projects, they’re like, “No, I have this whole plan,” but I feel like the way you’re approaching it is, is very different, but actually probably just as, if not more successful because you’re kind of giving yourself a little bit of freedom in what you’re doing to make sure that it’s right and it makes sense. I’m sure the end product is going to be fantastic.
Roger: May I share something? You just prompted something for me where you said how I am open. If I could leave people with one piece of advice, it’s to be open to change because you don’t know how the book is going to go. You don’t know at the end of the process if you’re going to stick with the same intended audience you started out with. I literally had a different name for this book until I wrote the last sentence of my of the book. And if you read the last sentence of the book, it says outthink outperform. That’s where the title came from. Like, that’s at the moment where I changed the title after nine months. I changed the title when I wrote the very last sentence of the book.
Jenn: You’ve got to roll with it. You’ve got to roll with it. You know, inspiration comes. You just got to be ready for it.
Roger: Yeah!
Kalli: And I gotta say, Roger, today you definitely did your homework, and we let this conversation flow because you answered the question I was just about to ask about what the best piece of advice is. And I really think that’s so important to let whatever your project is, whatever your book is, let it be what it’s going to be. And the fact that you’re able to change it- I think it’s so funny that it was the last sentence that you wrote ended up changing the title, which is obviously a huge part of the book. You know, I think that that really just speaks to that so well. Thank you so much for sharing that advice and all the insights and advice you shared today.
Roger: Well, thank you. I really appreciate you having me on the podcast. It’s been a great conversation. Hopefully, I wasn’t too verbose.
Kalli: Oh no, you were great. Thank you so much. We’re sure all of our listeners learned a lot today. And even just again, being free, if they take anything away from this. And for all the hopeful authors out there, we hope that you’ve gained valuable insights into the strategies that can help your book really and truly reach its full potential. And just remember, marketing is just as crucial as writing, and with the right approach to both, your book can have a lasting effect and lasting shelf life. If you found today’s episode helpful, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your friends and colleagues. Until next time.
